Health Affiliate Marketing: Is this the best market to make money?

Because the health industry is so big, it is difficult to decide what counts as health and what doesn’t.

Regardless of your definition, there is plenty of money spent each year on health and wellbeing. Whether it is on health insurance, gym membership, running shoes or herbal tea, money is spent in the billions.

As with any big industry, there is a large presence of affiliate marketers. In fact, it can often feel like health is the go-to niche for affiliate marketers.

But, can you still make money in the health niche? Is the market saturated? Is it possible to get traffic?

Let’s take a look.

What is the Health Industry?

The health industry stretches far and wide.

The most obvious route to take the health niche is down dieting/ weight loss avenue, but there are many niches and sub-niches to explore. In fact, it is almost endless.

Think of the exercise niche. In, for example, a triathlon website you have the opportunity to review running shoes, wetsuits, bikes, goggles and so on. There are great opportunities to monetize, but you can also create great content on the topic (e.g. The Beginner’s Guide to Open Water Swimming).

This can be duplicated across hundreds of sports or hobbies (yoga, fencing, judo, soccer, tennis).

In the illness sub-niche, you can focus on living with illnesses. Think of someone who has regular seizures, or has a child who suffers from seizures.

They may need a specialist helmet to protect them. They may need to make modifications to their house (e.g. a sit-down shower, handrails, wheelchair access, wider doorways, etc.). They may need specialist health insurance that covers their condition. All of this is a path to monetization.

But, you can also create great content. You can create a community for people to come together and share their stories. A place where parents who have been through it all can comfort and support those who are going through everything for the first time. This is great content that people will want to share and link to. It also has the added benefit of making a difference to people.

This can be replicated for almost any illnesses (living with diabetes, epilepsy, depression, arthritis).

Basically, there is a lot of potential in the health niche.

You are also more likely to be successful if you scratch beneath the surface. Instead of going for the obvious, try finding a niche where there is slightly less competition.

How Much Money Can Be Made?

Over $170 million of this was advertising and sponsorship. Just remember, there is more than one way to monetize your content. Advertising is not the most efficient way but, with enough traffic, it can generate substantial revenue.

This is reassuring because there is nothing extraordinary about Dr. Axe beyond the scale of the site. The execution is fairly standard.

It goes to show that if you can do all of the basics well (or excellently in this case) there is a lot of money to be made.

What are People Searching For?

Health Keywords

Keyword

Difficulty

Volume (desc)

planet fitness

22

1,080,000

fitness tracker

48

43,000

nike running shoes

13

37,000

best running shoes

26

32,000

nerd fitness

7

17,000

exercise ball

22

16,000

running pace calculator

24

7,500

fitness tracker reviews

56

6,200

best headphones for running

15

5,200

running socks

4

5,100

“Planet fitness” is searched for over 1 million times per month. Looking for branded keywords like this and writing reviews on the gyms is a great way to generate traffic. This is especially true if they have an affiliate program. This can be replicated for other gyms or products.

For example, in this list, we also have “nerd fitness”. This is a great opportunity to do a review that is monetizable. Nerd Fitness do have an affiliate program.

Although “fitness tracker” and “fitness tracker reviews” have a lot of competition, these are good examples of keywords as they show what direction you could take a website. A technology in sport website could, over time, rank for this keyword.

Like most niches, health is well suited to the “best x for y” content format. You can see this with “

best headphones for running”. This has a good search volume and not a great deal of competition.

A keyword like “running socks” just shows you how many products there are out there to promote. There is very little competition for a keyword with high search volume and some buying intent.

Hey, I'm Danny! I write full-time for Authority Hacker. I came from a background of more traditional marketing before I started work for a large affiliate marketing site a couple of years ago. Now I travel the world, write, market and watch sports!